The man pages for Duplicity suggest the syntax for Google Drive is the following;

gdocs://user[:password]@other.host/some_dir

This is correct, but doesn’t clearly explain the purpose of @other.host and how it impacts usernames. I was getting errors about two-factor authentication & application-specific passwords- which I’d already followed.

Turns out I was pushing my full username (e.g. [email protected]) into the user field (which is something Google requires elsewhere), while using an application password for the password field. I had mixed results, sometimes message about two-factor authentication and others about a parsing error (it thought the randomly-generated password was a port).

The syntax should probably read;

gdocs://user[:password]@gmail.com/some_dir

Or at least add an example (with a password of xyz) for user [email protected], into the directory Backups/Duplicity;

gdocs://bob:[email protected]/Backups/Duplicity

Perhaps if a user had a Google Apps domain, the original syntax would make more sense. An example nonetheless would alleviate any ambiguity.

I’m running Duplicity 0.7.0. This may change when the gdocs interface is revamped.